Recuva was described by vnunet.com as an "effective tool for undeleting or salvaging files we sent for recycling and deleted, in the past".[8] The program works on both FAT and NTFS file systems.[9] It is able to recover lost directory structure and automatically renames files when trying to recover two files of the same name. As of version 1.5.1 it can also recover files from Ext2 and Ext3 file systems.[10]

As with other file recovery programs Recuva works by looking for unreferenced data, but if the operating system has written new data over a deleted file then recovery will often not be possible.[11][12]